Counterfeit!

It was an ordinary Tuesday night, familiar, real. You could feel its soft texture between your fingers. I'd just finished supper and driven to the gas station to top off the tank. It was a cool wintry night, just a week or so ago.

I pumped my gas, walked in to pay. A couple of shoppers and the woman who worked the register were the only customers. The man with his boy, behind me in line, was clean cut, mustached, a nice-looking guy.

I gave the cashier my ten and headed out.

"Ma'am." It was the tone of a woman who meant business. I turned.

"This bill is counterfeit," she said. "You're going to have to stay here, ma'am. I've got to call the police."

"No, it isn't," I said in true disbelief. And then I wondered if it sounded like true disbelief or if it sounded like I was trying to make it sound like true disbelief.

She'd swiped it with one of those special markers. If it's real, she told me, the line is yellow, like the pen. But fake bills show up dark brown every time. The line on my ten-dollar bill was as dark brown as my dog's eyes. "That's as fake as it can get," she said. I stood by the counter while she called the city cops. "I've got one," she told them. And added, "She's not going anywhere."

By now my heart was doing double butterflies. I've seen all the crime shows about the wrongly accused, and in my head I began to picture me doing laundry in a women's prison for the rest of my life, teaching inmates to read, wearing the same blue uniform day after day. After all, the bill did have my fingerprints on it, all over it, and fingerprints are the next best thing to DNA. At home, they'd find brand new, good quality printing equipment and a scanner, a new computer with a souped up graphics program. They'd check our bank records and find 15 different accounts in 15 different banks.

"Don't I recognize you from the Dispatch?" The man behind me broke my thought. He was buying milk, or some other wholesome thing. His son stayed by his side.

I said yes, he did. I followed him to the parking lot where his wife let me use their phone to call home. Inside the cashier watched my every move through the plate glass. A cute white dog perched in the front seat of the car. I petted his fur and he licked my hand with his happy tongue. It occurred to me that you can't have dogs in prison.

Inside, I waited for the cops and my husband for what seemed like hours. Valentine merchandise already lined the shelves—kissing critters, roses, pink and red teddy bears with candy in their paws.

My husband and the cops arrived at the same time. The special investigator pulled up a few seconds later. "Where'd you get it?" the investigator asked me. "HE gave it to me," I said, pointing to my husband. If I were any kind of wife, I'd have lied to protect him, but I guess I'm no kind of wife.

Tons of questions. Forms. Phone calls. My husband wrote out his statement, the kind on the pads they shove you in the examination room when you confess. He told them where he'd gotten the ten as change, at a gas station across town, which, as it turns out, had been turning around a lot of fake bills.

The officers tossed the final question back and forth: "Who's the victim here?"

"Well, the gas station got its money. The government got the counterfeit bill." The investigator pointed his thumb our way. "They're the victims. They're out ten bucks."

Thing is, he said, "It's not even a good counterfeit. Anybody would know that's not real."

Anybody but two honest, hard-working parents, who drove away together, more glad than ever to be heading home.

First published in
The Dispatch (Lexington, NC).
Distributed nationally by the
New York Times News Service.